Finding Ulysses

I woke up this morning and realized I hadn’t bothered to write a segment for the ongoing alternative reality of World Without Oil. Workload aside, the reason is that two or three days is really all it takes to figure out what’s going to happen in the collective fiction event.

Ultimately, this kind of fiction project exposes the presumptions about the world that already exist in our heads, whether there are extreme events or not. About 1,400 other people are contributing to the project in one way or another, but looking through their contributions, and mine, I see them splitting up roughly into just two camps. One camp imagines that the increase of the price of oil by just a few dollars per gallon will cause riots in the street, economic collapse, and wars around the world. The other camp imagines that people will find ways to adjust their lives, alone and working together, and move on with some difficulty and anxiety, but without the end of civilization.

I put myself in the second camp, though I do peek over in my mind to pay attention to what’s going on in the other camp. I can see how communities where there are already significant problems would have those problems amplified in a crisis, but, although we do have strong divisions in the Town of Ulysses, our problems are really small potatoes compared to what other communities have to deal with.

I think Ulysses would come through all right in the end, given an energy crisis. Written as reports of a fictional reality, that conclusion lacks a certain sense of drama. Maybe that’s why other participants imagined elaborate disasters taking place in their neighborhoods. They didn’t want to get bored. Wouldn’t most of an energy crisis be rather tedious, though, like standing in a bread line?

I salute the creators of World Without Oil for creating a great psychological experiment. I have nothing against the project, but I’d like to go back now to looking at my community as it is, not how it would be in the future if things go terribly wrong.